Isis Unveiled: chapter II (A Deeper Philosophy)

“Years ago the old Germain philosopher, Schopenhaur, disposed of this force and matter at the same time; and since the conversation of Mr. Wallace, the great anthropologist has evidently adopted his ideas.

Schopenhauer’s doctrine is that the universe is but the manifestation of the will. Every force in nature is also an effect of will, representing a higher or lower degree of its objectiveness.

It is the teaching of Plato, who stated distinctly that everything visible was created or evolved out of the invisible and eternal WILL, and after its fashion.

Our Heaven – he says – was produced according to the eternal pattern of the “Ideal World”, contained, as everything else, in the dodecahedron, the geometrical model used by the Deity.

With Plato, the Primal Being is an emanation of the Demiurgic Mind (Nous), which contains from the eternity the “idea” of the “to be created world” within itself, and which idea he produces out of himself.”

The laws of nature are the established relations of this idea to the forms of its manifestations; these forms”, says Schopenhauer, “are time, space, and causality. Through time and space the idea varies in its numberless manifestations.”

These ideas are far from being new, and even with Plato they were not original. This is what we read in the Chaldean Oracles: “The works of nature co-exist with the intellectual υοεριο, spiritual Light of the Father. For it is the soul ψυχε which adorned the great heaven, and which adorns it after the Father.””